If you'd pegged Ironcast as one of those puzzle games that dresses itself up as strategy, you've got it the wrong way round. This is a strategy game - and a surprisingly fiendish one - that has donned the friendly clothing of a simple match-three timewaster. More than that, it's also a roguelike - or a roguelite, anyway, if you're happy to allow that word to exist. Whatever, it's the genuine article, with all the suffering that comes from a stat-wiping defeat, and all the anguish that builds as you ponder your next fateful decision.

And this is good news. Roguelikes and their ilk can make you feel pretty weak and feeble, but when the tumblers spin in your favour, they can turn you into a god. Take a humdrum sortie to Canterbury the other day. A loot drop went my way and instead of the normal common clobber, I was left with a rare missile launcher that does, on average, 198 points of damage per turn. I clamped it on back at the hangar, and did what came naturally: I headed to Croydon. Another humdrum sortie, of course, but this time enemies were coming apart in two blasts from that missile launcher, each pull on the trigger lofting a fat missile into the air. The thud! Oh, you never heard such a thud. And I never had such luck on a loot drop. I felt almost guilty, except I knew how long it would be before another drop went so thoroughly in my favour. Five hours of playing, and this had been my only rare.

Except right there in Croydon, I got another one. A rare energy beam, doing, on average, a sizzling 192! With weapons that tackled both the hulls of my enemies and the shields, I suddenly had all of my bases covered. Roguelikes, eh? (I died in Haslemere shortly afterwards.)

If Towerfall, Nidhogg and Samurai Gunn have taught me anything, it's that sometimes the simplest premises are the best. A multitude of game modes, complex move-sets and single-player campaigns are all well and good for our Halos, Street Fighters and Monster Hunters, but sometimes all you need is one brilliant idea well executed. That's what Vogelsap's The Flock is attempting to do with asymmetrical five-player multiplayer. And based on my time with it at GDC, it seems well on its way to delivering.

On the surface The Flock seems similar to Evolve with its four-on-one monster versus human(oid) game mechanic, but it's actually closer to a multiplayer take on Alien: Isolation. Unlike Evolve, in The Flock, you've got four monsters and only one human(oid). However, your role - and species, for that matter - changes throughout each match.

Initially everyone spawns as these alien gargoyles called The Flock. You all have the same goal: activate a series of light orbs with a magical flashlight. The problem is that whoever wields this flashlight, dubbed the Light Artifact, transforms into a humanoid being called the Carrier. The Carrier is weak. All they can do is walk and shine their light around. Thankfully, this Light Artifact's beam can instantly fry any Flock it illuminates. Fail to protect the Light Artifact and you'll respawn as another Flock while your killer now bears the torch.

Star Wars Pinball developer Zen Studios has revealed its next table based on Star Wars Rebels.

Due on the week of 27th April for Zen's stable of pinball series - including Pinball FX2, Zen Pinball 2, and Star Wars Pinball - this upcoming table will be based on Disney XD's animated TV series. As such, it will encompass seven missions that include the show's roster of characters and vehicles with fully-animated TIE fighters and the starship Ghost.

Back in 2013 Zen Studios wowed Eurogamer contributor Rich Stanton with its Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back table. "It seems ludicrous to say it about a pinball table, but this feels inextricable from the universe, its elements combining into something truly evocative," he wrote in his glowing Star Wars Pinball: The Empire Strikes Back review.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-31-star-wars-rebels-pinball-is-zen-studioss-next-table
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1746007Tue, 31 Mar 2015 01:15:00 +0100Woah Dave! will secretly be free for PS Plus members in April

Minimalist score-chasing platformer Woah Dave! will secretly be free in April for PlayStation Plus subscribers.

What we mean by secretly is that it won't officially be part of next month's Instant Game Collection, so you'll have to search for it separately - a tip unveiled on the PlayStation Blogcast.

This cool freebie was later confirmed for Europe by developer Choice Provisions, the new name of bit.trip studio Gaijin Games.

If you've played much of Captain Forever, you'll know that it can be hard to say exactly when a design starts to come together. Jarrad "Farbs" Woods' gloriously stark browser game blends creation and destruction from the moment you first load it up. This is a game about building spaceships by blasting other spaceships to pieces. Once a battle's finished, you switch from a soldier to a scavenger, an engineer, rooting through the wreckage and clamping anything useful you find onto your chassis. Ten minutes in, your craft will likely be a true beast of the cosmos. But the design of that craft? How does it start? Who really shapes it? Hard to say. Hard to say.

Fitting, then, that when I ask how Captain Forever Remix came about, nobody can provide an answer. "The idea was really an accident," says designer Dean Tate eventually. "It wasn't my idea. Or Brian's. Or Jarrad's."

Brian is Brian Chan, Tate's co-designer on Remix. The pair met at Harmonix, although they were on different teams back then. Tate's worked on games like BioShock 1 and 2, and he lead the design on Dance Central. Chan's been involved with Plants vs Zombies and Pandemic's Mercenaries games. Eventually, they tired of working in big organisations and decided to go indie. But how?

Butt Sniffin Pugs is a game about smelling canine bums. But it's about so much more than that. It's about peeing. And pooping. And barking. And biting. In short: it's a game about being a dog.

Shown off at GDC with a bizarre giant tennis ball/pug bottom controller (more on that later), SpaceBeagles' Butt Sniffin Pugs transcends vanilla concepts like good or bad, or smart or stupid.

Like Noby Noby Boy before it, there are no concrete goals in Butt Sniffin Pugs. You merely frolic about interacting with the scenery. But unlike Keita Takahashi's cult classic, Butt Sniffin Pugs can be played with two players.

2K Games is offering huge discounts on several of its biggest hits on the Humble Store, with some titles up to 83 per cent off.

Better yet, Spec Ops: The Line comes free with any purchase. So if you snag Sid Meier's Civilization Complete for £0.74 / $1.24, you'll still get Spec Ops with it. Nevermind that this makes purchasing Spec Ops on its own completely redundant.

Between now and Monday at 5pm GMT, loads of Sega game are heavily discounted on Valve's distribution portal with Alien: Isolation a spiffy 75 per cent off, making it a mere £7.99.

Also of note is the Sega Bundle, an anthology of 93 Sega titles, is a whopping 92 per cent off what each title would add up to individually, bringing the collection to a mere £59.99. That's not bad for an anthology that contains Valkyria Chronicles, Company of Heroes (1 & 2), Total War: Rome 2, Total War: Shogun 2, Binary Domain, Alpha Protocol, Hell Yeah!, and many, many more.

Easily the best thing about all these old-school RPG revivals has been remembering just how varied the classics truly were. Divinity Original Sin brought back the Ultima VII vibe, Wasteland 2 carried as much of Fallout as it did its namesake, and now Pillars of Eternity casts its resurrection spell on the classic that largely saved the genre from a descent into obscurity - Silver! No, wait. That other one. Baldur's Gate, that's it.

Pillars of Eternity isn't Baldur's Gate 3, but only because of a few technicalities like the name. Its new world is distinct from Forgotten Realms in detail rather than spirit, its engine and mechanics are patterned almost entirely after what BioWare and Black Isle were doing with the Infinity Engine back in the 90s. The backgrounds, higher resolution and with nicer effects, but cut from the same cloth. Each Act beginning with a portentous narrated text scroll. The map. The assassins out for your blood. The progression through small towns suffering from a background threat (this time to children rather than iron) before entering a big city of politics and intrigue. To be sure, you can find the individual elements there in many RPGs, but in this case the particular mix leaves no doubt as to what you're supposed to be feeling nostalgic about. And if any doubt persists, it's soon beaten over the head with the magic words "You must gather your party before venturing forth."

Occasionally, that can be a mite underwhelming. Part of what made Pillars' inspirations classics is that for their time, they were scrappy, adventurous, forging new terrain. The same has always gone for Obsidian's designs, being noted for their subversions and risk-taking and willingness to try spinning things in new directions even with existing franchises. Pillars of Eternity however, while ambitious, plays things very, very safe. It's absolutely the game that Obsidian's Kickstarter backers wanted and paid for, just lacking the company's usual flair for also giving us what we didn't know we wanted, or even the shake-ups to the formula supposedly made for the originally planned Baldur's Gate 3: The Black Hound. At times, it almost seems to pull away from its own twists. The occasional breaks from the action for Choose Your Own Adventure style storylets for instance sounded like a great idea for handling more complex encounters than the engine can offer, but in practice are typically "Try throwing a grappling hook? Okay, cool, it worked." I really wanted more of these, and more ambitious ones. The few that stand out really show their potential.

UPDATE 03/26/2015 12.27am: Toejam and Earl: Back in the Groove has successfully hit its $400K Kickstarter goal with two days to go.

The crowdfunded sequel has currently raised $415,336, though it still has some stretch goals to shoot for.

At $425K, developer Humanature will add oldschool skins for the titular duo; at $450K the Hyperfunk Zone from TJ&E 2 will be added; $500K will fund more playable characters; and $500K adds new guest composers.

Surreal survival sim Dyscourse is out now on PC, Mac and Linux via Steam.

Funded via Kickstarter, Dyscourse is the latest project by Owlchemy Labs, the studio behind Snuggle Truck, Jack Lumber, and Aaaaa! for the Awesome.

Dyscourse places players in the ragged threads of a survivor tasked with keeping the peace among their shipwrecked crew. The developer described it as "Lord of the Flies plus a choose-your-own-adventure book, with a dash of Lost, and a sprinkle of The Walking Dead (minus the zombies), crafted with the humour and style Owlchemy Labs is known for."

Competitive side-scrolling racing game SpeedRunners has sold 600K copies on Steam Early Access.

That's quite a lot when one factors in that this simple collaboration between its prototype developer DoubleDutch Games and co-developer/publisher tinyBuild Games has yet to see an official release. tinyBuild noted that players have cumulatively been logging in more than 1m sessions a month.

In a customer e-mail sent to our own Wesley Yin-Poole, the company stated, "Twitch does not store or process full credit or debit card information, so your card number is safe."

As far as what was compromised, Twitch said this could potentially include, "your Twitch username and associated email address, your password (which was cryptographically protected), the last IP address you logged in from, limited credit card information (card type, truncated card number and expiration date), and any of the following if you provided it to us: first and last name, phone number, address, and date of birth."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744622Mon, 23 Mar 2015 22:13:00 +0000Game of Thrones: Episode 3 is due this week on all platforms

Game of Thrones: Episode 3, The Sword in the Darkness, is due this week on PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, iOS and Android, developer Telltale has announced.

PC, Mac, and North American PlayStation users will receive it tomorrow.

Xbox and European PlayStation players will receive it the following day on the 25th.

Covering CCP's Fanfest event is always a uniquely interesting part of the games calendar. With the publisher adopting a more workmanlike commitment to Eve Online's future - rather than the wide-eyed ambitions of old - its annual jamboree in Reykjavik never felt more like videogaming's TED conference than it did this weekend.

“We came up with a crazy idea. Why don't we take these scientific research problems, transform them, and then inject them into major computer games as seamless gaming experiences that are completely integrated into game mechanics?”

Attila Szantner was inspired by citizen science projects like Zooniverse to create a platform called Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), a new way to provide amateur science enthusiasts with the means to analyse real-world data, and make meaningful contributions to the progress of scientific discovery. Despite the continued accelerating growth of computing power, citizen science solves a crucial problem for research: humans possess the gift of abstract insight, silicon does not.

The upcoming iPhone and Android phone versions of Hearthstone will be compatible with its PC, Mac, iPad and Android tablet counterpart, Blizzard has confirmed.

"It will be your exact same account, so all your cards on tablet or PC will be available on your phone too," said Hearthstone lead designer Eric Dodds in an interview with Gamespot. "When you start a match on a phone, you could be playing someone on another phone, someone on a tablet, on a PC, who knows? It's all one big ecosystem."

One concern with playing Hearthsone on the go is how quickly it will drain a smartphone's battery due to its always online requirement. "One thing we're constantly thinking about is how to make the most of the phone's battery," Dodds said. "I don't know if it uses a lot of data. You have to have a constant connection though. I wouldn't recommend playing it on a train."

Cities: Skylines hasn't reinvented the genre, sure, but it also didn't need to. By avoiding the worst of the mistakes that SimCity has now been remembered for, it's arguably the best city builder I've played in years.

Here's me saying that, but in more words, and with relevant visual aids:

Bodies are piling up everywhere. My city of Buttingham begins to convulse with disease as its infrastructure fails to keep it running. I build cemeteries and crematoria on every block, but it's not enough. The damage is done. In a few weeks, everyone is dead, my buildings either abandoned or burning, and I've got to admit failure as my budget spirals out of control. My frustration mounts as I realise that the failure isn't my fault.

I like Cities: Skylines, but the more I play, the more flawed it seems. Its foundation appears strong - built as it is upon the now-dead legacy of the once-great SimCity - but the cracks are still there.

In many ways Skylines picks up where SimCity left off, and it seems to tick off a checklist of features that fans of the series wanted to see. Bigger cities? You got it. Agrarian economies? Done. Offline play? Yes. Mods? Absolutely. At first, it's glorious. My brain filled with all the different possibilities. I wanted to express myself, I wanted to craft and carve so many different types and kinds of places. I wanted to push the game to its limits and see just what kind of weird concoctions I could get away with. But as my creations grew and grew and grew, I ran into one of the dumbest and most obnoxious problems from SimCity - poorly managed traffic.

Valve has updated its user agreement policy to make it against the rules to promote a product if you're receiving any commercial kickbacks without at least disclosing this.

"If you use Steam services (e.g. the Steam Curators' Lists or the Steam Broadcasting service) to promote or endorse a product, service or event in return for any kind of consideration from a third party (including non-monetary rewards such as free games), you must clearly indicate the source of such consideration to your audience," the new subscriber agreement stated (thanks Gamasutra).

The update adds 40 new stages to Adventure Mode, new boss battles, 3D grid shapes and gameplay types. The previous level gating system has been revised to make it easier for players to progress and unlock modes.

Elsewhere, Hardcore mode lets you play 20 dedicated levels without using a drone or super. There are individual leaderboards for this, too.

The former Gearbox employee wrote a fascinating postmortem on Borderlands 2's player character dialogue at Kotaku where he found himself following in the footsteps of Valve (Half-Life, Portal) until a focus group convinced him he was wrong. Later, a much bigger audience would do the same.

Initially Burch was a huge fan of the silent protagonist, because he didn't want there to be any friction between what the player wanted and what the character wanted. "This kind of characterisation works, in theory, because if your character never says anything you (the player) disagree with, you're more 'immersed,'" Burch explained. "You're not at risk of your protagonist saying something that you personally disagree with."

Players need to vote on the goat in order for this to happen, but given Goat Simulator's popularity, that's looking like a very real possibility. I mean, who wouldn't want an upside down goat with a jetpack carrying their items around with their tongue?

Get a look at Goat Simulator's titular billy in Dota 2 in the following trailer:

Hotline Miami 2 launched last week to critical acclaim, but a fair number of folks were disappointed to realise that the game wouldn't run on Windows XP, despite the system requirements saying otherwise prior to launch. This was unfortunate for those who pre-ordered the game.

Thankfully, there is now a fix for this via modder Silent. On the Steam forums they created an unofficial patch to this issue, which seems to have fixed the problem for many.

There are a few issues with the patch, though none of them are especially egregious. "When the game runs in DirectX 9 mode, it crashes on device lost," Silent noted. "To minimise the negative impact of this issue, the game is now forced to run in borderless windowed mode, so it still appears to be fullscreen, but cannot be minimized like regular fullscreen applications. The game will still crash when applying changes to any Graphics settings. Don't worry, despite the crash, all the changes got applied! When you launch the game again, the settings will be changed."

Cards Against Humanity - the comedic party game about matching funny, offensive cards to funny, offensive prompts - is now available for free online.

Dubbed Cards Against Originality, this web app was actually made by a third party developer named Dawson Whitfield. This is completely legal as the original Cards Against Humanity was made under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone is free to replicate and distribute it so long as it's not for profit.

One of Cards Against Humanity's original developers, Max Temkin, embraces this unofficial app. "I'm glad that our fans have been able to take Cards Against Humanity and remix it into their own original things; that's been a goal since we started working on our project," he told Endgadget. "Cards Against Humanity is obviously a remix of the comedy and games and pop culture that we love, and it's extremely cool to see our thing inspiring people to make stuff."

Goat Simulator is coming to both Xbox One and Xbox 360 in April, Microsoft has announced.

No specific release date or price has been announced, though if it comes out on 1st April that would coincide with the game's anniversary. We're also not sure whether this console port will include the World of Warcraft parody free update.

Eurogamer contributor Dan Whitehead found Goat Simulator to be an amusing sandbox of physical comedy. "It's rough around the edges, and amuses only for a short but sweet time, which may lead some to look askance at the price tag. Yet there are plenty of games which cost more and entertain far less, so while Goat Simulator is a joke, it's at least one in which the player is a willing participant," he wrote in his Goat Simulator review.

There are no plans to nerf either Hearthstone's Hunter Hero or the popular Dr. Boom card, according to game director Eric Dodds. The confirmation came as part of an interview with Eurogamer's dedicated Hearthstone sister site MetaBomb at Rezzed, the PC and indie gaming show hosted by Gamer Network.

Dr. Boom is an extremely popular character from the most powerful Legendary class of cards in Hearthstone. Not only does he appear on the board as a solid fighting force in his own right, he also summons a pair of low attack, low health mechanical contraptions which detonate on death to inflict even more damage against random enemy opponents.

It's certainly more powerful than similar cards of an equal resource cost, but it's the breadth of deck archetypes the doctor appears in that seems destined to keep him in rude health.

Ask me my favourite game of all-time and I'm split between two titles: Spelunky and Demon's Souls. Excitingly, Shadowrun Returns developer Harebrained Schemes is attempting to mix the two in its upcoming action roguelike Necropolis. Whether it will succeed in such a lofty ambition is another matter, but the Shadowrun developer seems to have a good grasp on what it's doing, even if it's following in From and Mossmouth's nearly impossible to follow footsteps.

Taking hold of the controller in Necropolis puts you right in pure Souls territory. The right trigger buttons handle light and heavy attacks, left triggers block and bump the shield, the D-pad handles weapon and item swapping, while the face buttons evade and use items. There is a dedicated jump button - so that's new - but the basic skeleton of Necropolis will feel familiar to anyone who's handled a Souls game.

While the controls are well-worn territory, the design is entirely new. This is a procedurally generated dungeon-crawler with a neon, aquamarine-hued aesthetic. Passages, enemy waves, and items reconstruct with every playthrough as you take the reins of what essentially amounts to a groundskeeper whose omnipotent boss' collection of demons has run amok in an ever-shifting inter-dimensional zoo.

Cities: Skylines has sold more than a quarter million copies in its first 24 hours on the market.

That's a new record for publisher Paradox Interactive.

"We at Colossal Order are absolutely thrilled to see so many players enjoying Cities: Skylines and that the Steam Workshop is filling up with amazing content from the modders," said developer Colossal Order's CEO Mariina Hallikainen. "We are feeling very happy and proud and can't wait to continue working on Cities: Skylines together with the community!"

This release of Young Horses' incognito octopus sim will run in 1080p and supports up to four-player co-op wherein each player controls different tentacles. It also includes the game's two free "Shorts" add-ons. One of which covers Octodad's first date with his now-wife, Scarlet, while the other envisions a "what if" scenario in which our hero is a surgeon.

Eurogamer contributor Dan Whitehead found Octodad: Dadliest Catch "frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious." More intriguingly, he thought it was a "surprisingly sweet game with a genuine depth to its main character."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1742498Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:25:00 +0000BBC is making a drama about the creation of Grand Theft Auto

The BBC is making a 90-minute live-action drama about the inception of Grand Theft Auto.

Games and tech journalist Guy Cocker called it "a 90-minute feature-length drama focussing on the people behind its creation."

The programme will be part of the BBC's Make it Digital initiative as an effort to generate interest in tech amongst youngsters.

Post-apocalyptic open world shooter Homefront: The Revolution has been delayed until 2016, publisher Deep Silver has announced.

The last we heard, the game was set for a vague "2015" launch - but this was before developer Crytek UK was closed down and then bought by Deep Silver, which relaunched it as Deep Silver Dambuster Studios.

Deep Silver's acquisition of the studio included the rights to the Homefront franchise - as well as all work on The Revolution created to date.

Sid Meier's Starships shares one crucial theme with Civilization: Beyond Earth, the game whose story it loosely continues. Both titles hinge on a very simple idea, powerfully stated: the worst thing you're ever likely to find floating around out in space is another human being.

In many ways, Firaxis' latest offers even greater scope for our wretched species to express itself. Well, a greater stage, at any rate. Beyond Earth limited itself to the atrocities we might cause when scouting a new homeworld. Starships, however, throws open the entire galaxy. We're not finding out feet anymore. In fact, we've been granted wings. Cue gunship diplomacy. (Just me?)

Beyond that - and beyond a few themed unlockable treats - actual links between both games tend to be relatively cosmetic. Before you begin each match here, you choose from a familiar muddle of affinities and faction leaders, but they're all just starting perks, really, and while the game that lies beyond these choices is a turn-based affair, it's far breezier than Beyond Earth: a nice territory-capture strategy treat as you move between planets, a compact hex-based battler when you get into orbit around one.

Dutch developer Triumph has announced a second major expansion for fantasy strategy game Age of Wonders 3, called Eternal Lords.

It's due 14th April alongside the awaited Linux and Mac ports of the original game. It also marks a year of continued development since AOW3 launched.

Eternal Lords brings a new Necromancer class to the table, with spooky undead units such as the Bone Collector, who uses corpses to strengthen itself, and the Banshee who presumably screams a lot. When Necromancers conquer settlements they become cities of the dead.

Terraria: Otherword, the next game in the popular sandbox series, is built around Tower Defense.

Developer Re-Logic said players need to defend what are called Purifying Towers with customisable Wartowers. Setting up these Wartowers means you can defend Purifying Towers without being near them.

While Otherworld, like its predecessor, will be about exploring, gathering and building, the main objective is to return the world to its pristine form by pushing back the Corruption. So, you'll spend much of your time finding, crafting then activating Purifying Towers.

Yesterday, something beautiful happened. Luck and insight collided, and the result was spectacular.

I was playing a Knockout game against stoical old Mentor Brack of Team Redemption. His guys had the ball, and he opted for a straight run down the left side of the field, bringing other players in close to defend against any blockers. Bold stuff, but potentially dangerous. I guessed he'd spend most of his defensive energy on the first half of the journey, and I was right, I felt a real jolt of happiness as I saw his ball carrier racing to the bottom half of the field where three of my guys had gathered at the goal to greet him. The thrill of it! The thrill of a careful plan foreseen and scuppered. Even better, though, Brack's careless play meant he had left all of his team - all five of them - wallowing on the far left of the field, which gave me something you almost never see in Frozen Cortex: an open path from the bottom of the pitch to the very top, over on the right. I couldn't believe it was happening. With the ball in my hand, I raced the whole length of that field, hitting four points zones and then landing a goal. (4 x 2) + 7: a 15 point play. "I need to profoundly rethink my defence," said Brack. He wasn't wrong. In the end, I beat him 31-0. You can tell a lot about the quality of a strategy game by trying to decide if a one-sided outcome still feels fair. This felt fair.

Like Frozen Synapse, Frozen Cortex is a turn-based tactics affair in which everybody's turns play out at once. You decide on your move at your own leisure, you position your pieces, you hesitate, you commit, and then the beautiful mess you've created unfolds - your actions, your opponent's actions, the whole hilarious disaster. It's a double-blind kind of deal, I think, and the fun of this approach comes from anticipation and adaptation. It's surprisingly tense, and surprisingly involving. It cuts right to the heart of strategy gaming.

Final Fantasy 14's first expansion, Heavensward, has been dated, with it due to hit all platforms on June 23rd.

First announced last year, Heavenward introduces a whole new location while expanding the existing play area, adds new flying mounts and also introduces a new loot system, a brand new race and three new jobs. It will also introduce an all-new raid, Alexander, which will be available in both normal and hard modes.

Heavensward was originally scheduled for release this Spring, so the June release date sees a slight delay. An Early Access version will be available for some players from June 19th.

Toddler-simulating horror game Among the Sleep has shifted over 100K copies, developer Krillbite Studio revealed to Eurogamer at GDC.

The novel first-person spin on things that go bump in the night was the debut commercial effort for the eight-person Norwegian studio. It originally began as a student project before Krillbite decided to expand it into a full game. A PS4 version with Morpheus support is currently in the works.

While this was Krillbite's first commercial product, the studio made the free text-less narrative adventure The Plan, which follows the life of a fly ascending into whatever glorious horizons flies ascend into.

Shelter 2 switches out badger cubs for lynx cubs (possibly called kittens, although this point appears hotly contested) and there are still a whole bunch of interesting ways in which you can fail them as a parent. Brillo.

With a larger open-world to survive and the ability to hunt deer in a way that a badger never really could because of their small ungainly legs, it's looking like a rather worthy sequel so far. Join Donlan and myself as we take a look:

UPDATE 4TH MARCH 2015: And now he, the World of Warcraft anomaly, who belongs to neither Horde nor Alliance, has reached level 100.

He lives in the starting zone of the Pandaren race, the Wandering Isle, where he must remain in order to stay faction neutral. Most other characters leave at level 10, and all the game content is scaled accordingly.

That's why it's taken four months - since the launch of Warlords of Draenor in November - of plant-picking, of wringing every last tiny dribble of experience, to achieve. And for that, Doubleagent, we salute you.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-24-wow-player-reaches-level-90-as-neither-horde-or-alliance
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1688440Wed, 04 Mar 2015 15:05:00 +0000Gone Home is no longer in development for consoles

As reported by DualShockers and confirmed by Eurogamer, the console version is no longer being worked on. “Our publishing deal with Majesco has ended, and the console version is not in active development,” developer Fullbright's co-founder Steve Gaynor told Eurogamer.

Fullbright is currently working on a first-person sci-fi adventure called Tacoma. It looks a bit like a mix of Gone Home with the dev's previous work on the wonderful BioShock 2 DLC Minerva's Den.

Heart of Thorns is the first expansion for MMO Guild Wars 2, and it was playable last week for the first time.

I captured footage as I took the new Revenant profession for a run and saw the densely detailed and vast new Maguuma Jungle for mein own eyes. I played the new Stronghold player versus player mode but unfortunately wasn't able to capture from it.

The Revenant is the profession that summons legends from Guild Wars history to use in battle. I tried the Legendary Dwarf Stance (Jalis Ironhammer) and the Legendary Demon Stance (Mallyx). It seems like you can switch between them without much cooldown, if any, allowing for some strong combination possibilities. There will be more legends to choose from eventually.